clinging to the wreckage

After a catastrophic car day I ended up using the train to get home. I made the most of the fact that I did not have to drive and had a beer with a friend after work before walking to the station and waiting twenty five minutes for the delayed train. The train station was awash with students from the local college... for some reason, all of them female. They seemed to be astonished by my presence, alone, wearing headphones, on the platform across from the one at which they were all waiting for their train... also delayed. Both trains arrived at the same time and I climbed aboard, happy to escape the increasing cold of the platform. As we approached Gatwick airport, the passenger next to me got up and walked away leaving his backpack on the seat. Of course, this caused me to start analysing the situation both from the sense of our general fear of terrorism to the behavioural aspects of being inconsiderate enough in the modern climate to do such a thing as leave your backpack unatte...

I’m at home, alone, as usual, and digging through my book shelves trying to find books that I can loan to those who have asked if I have anything they might like. I try to find something that would appeal uniquely to that individual and it brings me great pleasure to find books that are relevant. I have a glass of wine and read some of the social media networks only to discover that people are watching celebrity chef or celebrity big brother or some celebrity show or other. Others are being treated to holidays in the soulless Las Vegas... a soulless man takes a soulless woman to Las Vegas because he is so desperate to have sex with her he is willing to go that far. Why do I use the word ‘soulless’? I don’t have a soul. None of us do. But, you know what I mean. The expression Soulless = shallow, fake, plastic, phoney, empty, of no substance. Las Vegas and Dubai, the soulless person’s havens. I’m too old fashioned for this McDonalds shaped planet. 

This morning, as I drove down the A3, heading towards the London Orbital, feeling miserable and thinking about my parents whose dog drowned in their swimming pool yesterday, I saw a magnificent bird flying above the cars – just above the cars – in the outside lane. I was astonished by its wingspan which was far greater than the size of any cars below it. Initially I thought it might be a bird of prey and that it considered one of the cars to be its prey, for it was flying at the same speed as the cars. Suddenly, the bird landed in the outside lane. The cars screeched to a halt and this beautiful bird (I still couldn’t determine what kind of bird it was) looked about innocently as if trying to understand what the fuss was. I felt violently sick because the only cars to stop were those in the fast lane and they started to pull around the bird. There is simply no way it could have made it away alive. I started to wonder if all the animals of the world had become suicidal. First my pa...

In my dreams you’re always in love in love with everyone everyone except for me and everyone knows it everyone is aware of your deepest desires everyone except for me. Most of the time you won’t even look at me but when you do it’s to see me looking at you and then, aware of when it will hurt the most, you reveal yourself in a crowded room you show them everything they could have and you show me everything I can never have again. So I spend these 3:30ams staring at things, talking to the cats, thinking about you.

These nights, these weeks, fly by so quickly. It’s a Wednesday night... I recognise it by the fact that I need to put out the recycling later for collection in the morning. I recognise it by the fact that I am washing dishes in an empty house once more with an aching heart because I’m thinking about you and how you choose to ignore me most days these days. And on days like this you look so beautiful that it pours salt into my open wounds. So I go through the motions of making another empty, meaningless meal and as I speak to my cats and hum some dumb tune I wonder what the point of it all is. The thing is; even if you wanted to be with me I don’t believe that we would be happy for more than a couple of years and that we’d simply be caught up in the same game that the rest of humanity seems to be trapped playing. The game of conventional lifestyles... jumping through hoops to support children and to pay for a house. I don’t want that. I never have. And I think that you too now re...

Depressed, he stumbled out of his front door into the freezing cold night. The crunching sound of the snow underfoot almost brought a tinge of pleasure to his drunken, miserable haze. It all seemed too much to bear. Everything from passing a field full of sheep in the morning to the atrocious usage of corporate wallpaper and screensavers at work drove him to despair. Where once a field of sheep would bring him a sense of peace and pleasure, Max was now simply saddened by their hopelessness; innocent creatures peacefully lazing in a beautiful field of green, surrounded by trees, were nothing but a symbol of humanity’s need to feed the masses. Innocent creatures to be brutally snatched, slaughtered, butchered and sold for consumption when the need saw fit. With these thoughts Max had arrived at work and listened to his colleagues laughing and joking in the kitchen on the other side of the thin, useless wall that had been erected to bring some form of privacy to those attempting to wo...